A political theology of participatory sovereignty: the acephalic corpus of the general will

This thesis offers a politico-theological examination of the body politic and its members, a trope which serves as the point of departure in this attempt to contribute to the ongoing critical engagements with the variant of political theology that has dominated the discourse since German jurist Carl Schmitt’s Political Theology, published in 1922. Returning to the acclaimed origin of the politico-theological tradition of the West, church Father Saint Augustine, it argues that Augustine’s thought offers a radically different way in which to conceive of embodied political sovereignty, veiled behind centuries of accumulated misreadings that have produced what today is considered as ‘political Augustinianism’.

The first part of the thesis initially attempts to establish that Saint Augustine’s theological anthropology, including his doctrine of original sin, might be summarized in the notion of the volitional self, upon which follows that the individual member as well as the body politic itself is constituted and perpetuated through willing participation. The two subsequent chapters provide a historical overview spanning the subsequent millennia, intended to illuminate the manner in which this doctrine changed under the influence of mainly Stoic tradition and Roman law. The final chapter of the first part considers the afterlife of this splintered tradition in early modern French political and moral theory, looking broadly at French Augustinianism and more specifically at the Jansenist movement.

The second part of the thesis puts forward the suggestion that Augustine’s political theology was inherited by Jean Jacques Rousseau. Although the last century has seen an increased scholarly awareness of the influence the French Augustinian tradition exercised on Rousseau’s thought, most commentators tend to overlook the distinction which the first part of the thesis has sought to establish; the fundamental politico-theological differences between corrupted variants of Augustinianism and the doctrines of Saint Augustine himself. This neglect impacts, it is suggested, the accuracy of existing works which deals with the relationship between Rousseau’s thought and the economic doctrines of interest which arose contemporaneously with him, and which were informed by the ‘secular hamartiology’ of the ‘Augustinian’ tradition. Having proposed that one can only fully appreciate the nature of Rousseau’s social and political critique provided that one acknowledges that his thought inherits Saint Augustine’s understanding of the volitional self and body, rather than its deviations, the two final chapters of the thesis offers critical engagements with contemporary analyses of the afterlife of Rousseau’s thought which view him as complicit in the political and economic theologies of governmentality that dominate our present. To the contrary, it is argued, Rousseau’s political voluntarism, sustained by the doctrine of volition established by Saint Augustine, accommodates another body politic; an acephalic body characterised by participatory sovereignty.